I got the cover art for The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, and it looks terrific. Fits in perfectly with the previousbooks. I’ll likely do a cover reveal before long.

Now that business is out of the way, let’s talk about some other stuff.

—

After watching a series of mediocre-to-terrible movies, culminating in the execrable ordeal titled Get Out, I got concerned that I may have just grown tired of movies in general. If tastes change, why can’t interests?

Pleasantly, I found that this is not the case after watching and enjoying Baby Driver. This was a fun movie. A bit long in the last third, but I couldn’t help but like all of it. It straddled the line between comedy and drama, not taking itself too seriously, and did what movies are supposed to do first and foremost: entertain. Not sure why John Bernthal got top billing; he was in the movie for five minutes at most. John Hamm rose above his Mad Men role to become a great guy to watch. Ansel Elgort was likable and vulnerable without being weak. Lily James had an ethereal, vintage beauty and charm that she used like a bludgeon, making you want to watch her and only her. Everything fit together well, everything was neatly done. (I even liked Kevin Spacey. Is that bad?) Overall, this is a rare film that lives up to the hype.

—

The story of Alfie Evans is absolutely brutal, and it underscores four important points:

There is a pernicious and disturbing tendency for far too many of us to place vitally important decisions wholly in the hands of “experts.” Experts have become the new royalty, now that social media has proven that the previous royalty, politicians, are as buffoonish and ineffectual as we always suspected them to be. Medical experts in the UK are starving a baby boy to death. If that’s the value of expertise, I want none of it.

This would not happen in the United States of America. Other citizens of other countries are subjects. We are a free people, born and bred. Rarely has such a distinction been so sharp.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights precisely because of situations like Alfie Evans. Gun-grabbers love to talk about gun-free Utopias like those found in Europe, but they don’t seem to understand the vast cultural differences between the U.S. and, say, the United Kingdom.

History has ended for Europe, and its death throes are terrible to watch.

I pray God Alfie Evans can leave to find treatment. I pray for his family.

—

The entire Starbucks situation is so bizarre, so ludicrous, that I can’t help but think we’re all being experimented upon by aliens studying human behavior in the 21st century. What happened is that two black men walked into a Starbucks and wanted to use the bathroom. The store manager told them they had to buy something before they could use the bathroom. They refused to buy anything. They stayed inside the establishment as non-paying non-customers. The store manager asked them to leave if they weren’t going to buy anything. They refused to leave. The store manager then asked the police to remove them. The police came and asked the non-paying non-customers to leave. They refused to leave. The police then handcuffed them and escorted them from the premises. The race card was thrown, successfully. Starbucks will now close down over 8,000 stores for an afternoon to teach their apparently racist employees how not to be racist anymore.

I have a few questions about this situation that I’d like cleared up:

Who refuses to leave a private business when asked to by a representative of that business?

Why couldn’t one of them buy a $2.00 cup of coffee and defuse the entire situation? At that point they’d have gone from non-paying non-customers to paying customers. They could’ve then used the bathroom and sat there as long as they’d have liked.

Who refuses to comply with a police officer’s instructions?

Why is this a company-wide Starbucks problem instead of an individual problem? It’s like shutting down an entire town for a day because someone’s car was broken into. It makes no sense.

Easter’s coming up, so you know what that means: another great opportunity to buy lots of chocolate in various shapes, sizes, and flavors.

Just kidding. I know it’s really about coloring eggs and going to brunch.

While we’re on the subject of Easter, here’s an opinion piece written in The Fenwick Review, which comes out of the College of the Holy Cross:

Professor [Tat-Siong Benny] Liew’s contribution to [They Were All Together in One Place?: Toward Minority Biblical Criticism], a chapter entitled “Queering Closets and Perverting Desires: Cross-Examining John’s Engendering and Transgendering Word across Different Worlds,” demonstrates the centrality of sex and gender to his way of thinking about the New Testament. In the chapter, Professor Liew explains that he believes Christ could be considered a “drag king” or cross-dresser. “If one follows the trajectory of the Wisdom/Word or Sophia/Jesus (con)figuration, what we have in John’s Jesus is not only a “king of Israel” (1:49; 12:13– 15) or “king of the Ioudaioi” (18:33, 39; 19:3, 14– 15, 19– 22), but also a drag king (6:15; 18:37; 19:12),” he claims.5 He later argues that “[Christ] ends up appearing as a drag-kingly bride in his passion.”6

Liew goes on to further describe Jesus Christ as a drag queen. In some circles, this is what passes for theological scholarship. This is serious academic study.

This is crap. This is why many of us are not going to push our children into a college system that produces this kind of bilge. Liew would never imply that Islam’s Mohammed was a cross-dressing person of indeterminate gender; Liew wouldn’t dare. Nor, I suspect, would Liew do the same with Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob in my faith: Judaism. So-called academics like this Liew character are cowards and reprobates, and the longer they stay within the college system, the more debased the entire enterprise of higher learning becomes. You’ve got to get the idea out of your head that this is normal. That this is what academia is meant to explore. It isn’t. This is deliberately inflammatory crap tarted up as serious study by people with axes to grind and/or significant emotional problems. It’s not ethical to ignore it in the name of tolerance. If you think college is the right choice for your child, it’s your duty to push back against this.

Unless you’re trying to raise a child whose major is Queer Dance Theory. Be honest: is that what you really want for your kid?

—

Rather than repeat everything I’ve said about Facebook in the wake of everyone being mad at Facebook, I’ll just point you to these two pieces I wrote here and here. Social media is a bit like a handgun: a tool, neutral until it’s picked up and used. Until we can all learn to use it in a way that doesn’t let it use us, I think we’re all justified in treating it like a gun. A gun manufactured and maintained by people with undeniably sinister intent.

—

We need to talk a little more about using children as human shields in the political process, which I touched on here. The latest and most disgustingly egregious example of this is the recent March for Our Lives rally, in which the children who attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School gave partisan political speeches on behalf of left-wing politicians under the false flag of saving lives. If we’re going to address these issues seriously, let’s keep some basic, undeniable truths in mind:

Experiencing a terrible event does not magically confer wisdom, no matter how terrible the event may have been. Experiencing terrible grief also does not confer moral authority on any issue. As mature adults we must sympathize, lend an ear, and offer comfort. Helping to shoulder a fellow human being’s burden is a good thing. Altering public policy on the basis of individual trauma, no matter how keenly felt, is not a good thing, particularly when those policy changes are based on emotion rather than reason.

The vast, vast, vast majority of children do not have anything incisive or original to say about public policy, including policy relating to firearms issues. They lack the experience, wisdom, and knowledge to promote a solution worth considering.

Activists who use children as spokespeople do so because those children are considered unassailable: to disagree with a wounded child is to turn a blind eye to that child’s traumas. How dare you criticize a young, innocent child, no matter what that child says or does? This is a disgusting and deliberate attempt to use these children as human shields in America’s ongoing political struggles. It was racist to disagree with the previous president; now it’s monstrous to disagree with David Hogg.

The adults behind these children are entirely without shame, ethics, or moral character. This includes these children’s parents. They are not good people. They’re not people you’d want to associate with.

Thee children have been given free rein to say anything they like, no matter how inflammatory or sickening, because they’re “trying to participate in American democracy.” The conclusion we’re supposed to reach is that there’s something wrong with you if you push back against the notion that you’re a bloodthirsty wannabe child killer because of your membership in the NRA. If you do anything other than sit back, nod sagely, and accept your demonization, you’re a bad person. A snowflake.

My little boy gave me this the other day, apropos of nothing at all. According to my moral betters, I love my guns more than I love him.

One thing social media has been good for is the exposure of the national id onto a public forum. A gigantic segment of our population has grown comfortable expressing knee-jerk reactions to current events as though such feelings were worthy of consideration by thoughtful adults. They’re not. They never were. First-response moralizing, particularly in the face of horrors like the Parkland murders, is in all cases childish, unwelcome, and empty of meaning.

And yet it’s out there and gotten legs, so we have to address it.

In the wake of Parkland it’s become daring, brave, or somehow original to express the idea that children shouldn’t be murdered, particularly when they’re at school. (“I just want the kids to be safe.”) It’s also become quite the thing to tell the world that children should have a safe place to learn. This is the default, least courageous position to take on any issue ever conceived of, because it’s inarguable. Bravo. You’ve gone out on a limb with the easiest moral stance. Take a bow.

Virtue-signaling on this (or any) issue is unspeakably lazy. It leads to the ugly claim that people who disagree with you on how school safety is to be achieved actually don’t care if children are murdered or not. It leads to false choice fallacies like, “Your gun fetish gets our children killed.” And it leads to large numbers of supposedly thoughtful and mature people blaming the NRA for crimes they literally had nothing to do with.

The serious conversation about guns that we apparently need to have can’t happen because the people who keep insisting on having that serious conversation are fundamentally unserious. Driven by emotion, by the id that demands that the scary thing be taken away at all costs, their intent isn’t to talk, but harangue. To shriek, with hands over ears, until everyone else capitulates. That’s not a conversation.

Once you’ve ascended the high, lonely moral pedestal of “No more child murders,” you’ve also concluded that few others share your rarefied air, and you can then demonize them to your swollen heart’s content. And you do demonize them. I’ve seen it. It led me to join the NRA myself. In all likelihood, I’m the only person in my entire family to have done so. I did it not because I’m particularly brave or have any love for the NRA, but because I can’t stand the shrieking, hysterical demonization from people whose moral authority is entirely self-derived.

This is why politicizing every tragedy is such a terribly poisonous thing. We’ve elevated our politics to a moral level, rather than seeing it as a function of group decision-making. If you call others unethical reprobates because they disagree with your political solution to a moral problem, then yeah, you’re going to go the extra mile and claim that these unethical reprobates love guns more than they love their children.

Limiting freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, a political document, is an expressly political act. Calling it a moral imperative because you happen to be one of the brave few who doesn’t want to see “our” children get murdered at school doesn’t make it a moral imperative. We can disagree on gun ownership in the United States, and if you have the stomach for it, you can try to use the engine of politics to see your point of view formed and flaked into policy. But what you can’t do is claim that your emotional, knee-jerk reaction is the right and proper moral choice in these dark times. Your moral default is neither brave nor inspiring, and you deserve no credit for it. It’s unfortunate that your teachers, parents, and mentors haven’t taught you this, but it’s the truth, and you’re better off knowing it.

Get out there and repeal that Second Amendment. Ban the things that frighten you. Use the power of the state to disarm us all. But don’t fool yourself into believing that your politics are anything more than childish emotionalism, and stop congratulating yourself for assuming the default moral position. You’re not special; you’re just lazy.

Music’s a deeply personal thing: what you like, what you don’t like, what you love, what you can’t stand. When I was writing for Exposure Bucks at The Loftus Party, I took the #ScrewYouILikeIt hashtag Michael Loftus suggested in his podcast and ran with it, talking about my horrible taste in 80’s bands. The lukewarm response to the piece suggested that my Exposure check bounced.

Current events see me going back to the 1980’s musical well once more. Today I’m focusing on the band Marillion and its early years, when Derek Dick, AKA Fish, was the lead singer. My favorite Marillion song is Grendel from the 1988 album B’Sides Themselves. It’s an amazingly macabre song, grim and brooding and horribly violent, just like its principal character: the inhuman beast Grendel from the Old English poem Beowulf. If you haven’t read Beowulf before, I urge you to get a copy. In my college years I had to translate the first few pages myself for a class in Old English, which fulfilled a language requirement. It wasn’t as much fun as you’d think. So get a translated copy and read it.

The song Grendel focuses on Beowulf‘s chief antagonist: the man-eating monster Grendel. Its early stanzas describe not just Grendel’s monstrous acts, but the terror he inflicts on the helpless Danes:

Wooden figures, pagan gods, stare blindly cross the sea
Appeal for help from ocean fogs, for saviour born of dreams
They know their lives are forfeit now, priestly heads they bow in shame
They cannot face the trembling crowd that flinch in Grendel’s name

The Viking gods the Danes worship can’t stop Grendel, whose hunger is never sated. As King Hrothgar’s Danes cower in Heorot, their redoubt, the beast comes nightly to take another warrior. And another. And another. The song’s chorus reinforces the Danes’ helplessness:

Earth rim walker seeks his meals
Prepare the funeral pyres
The shaper’s songs no longer heal the fear
Within their eyes, their eyes

The shaper is a blind man, a poet and minstrel, who sings songs of heroism to bolster the courage of Hrothgar’s men. Grendel is himself both fascinated and enraged by the shaper, and near the end of the song, when things really pick up, Grendel speaks in his own voice:

So you thought that your bolts and your locks would keep me out
You should have known better after all this time
You’re gonna pay in blood for all your vicious slander
With your ugly pale skins and your putrid blue eyes

And the blood does flow. In the poem, the Geat (Swedish) hero Beowulf rips off Grendel’s arm, killing him, and then tracks Grendel’s mother to her home beneath a lake and kills her, too.

As we learn more about the horrible events in Parkland, Florida, from the dreadful failures of law enforcement on all levels to the foolish and cowardly calls to disarm in the face of evil, we’re finding that America’s schools are more like Heorot than we imagined, helpless to defend against the bloodthirsty Grendels that would assail them. In Parkland, no Beowulf came to save the children; instead, law enforcement waited outside while the monster sated himself with seventeen lives.

That’s unacceptable. It also reinforces something many of us have known our whole lives: we each have to be our own rescuer. Our own Beowulf. Your default cannot, must not be set to helplessness. The next school shooter, the next Grendel is right now, at this very moment, planning an attack on innocent children. Banning bump stocks or “assault weapons” or all firearms will not stop him. What will stop him is the bravery of individuals who have taken the responsibility of their own personal safety into their own hands.

Unlike the Grendel of Beowulf, it doesn’t take a magic sword or a legendary hero to take down a school-shooting maniac. All it takes is a well-placed bullet. America’s public schools are a hundred thousand Heorots, proclaiming themselves gun-free zones while Grendel lurks at the threshold. Let’s act in our own defense.

It’s time for some straight talk about guns in the United States. This is likely to alienate many of you, but we’ve tiptoed around this issue long enough. I’ve been a part of America’s gun culture for two decades, both personally and professionally; I’ve produced, directed, shot, and edited several instructional videos on combat shooting; and I’ve studied firearms tactics, real-world examples of gun violence, and the history of the U.S. Constitution, where the Second Amendment resides. So I know a little bit about the issue of private firearm ownership.

The most important thing to take away from what I’m saying is this: gun owners think that people who want to take away their right to own guns are pussies. Sissies. Cowards. If this is you, you’ve outsourced the protection of your family to others. You’ve abandoned your responsibility as a man. Not only that, but in your pants-wetting fear of an inanimate object, you would make everyone else as helpless as you are. There’s a tiny part of you that knows you’re weak, and this knowledge makes you feel small in the presence of braver men. After all, nobody wants to be the only coward; misery loves company. So you’d enslave us all to your personal weakness. Whether you’re a brother, a parent, a teacher, or a friend, we’ll always have that reservation about you, because you’ve succumbed to an irrational fear and demand that all other men do the same. It’s ugly and mean and unfair, but that’s the way it is, and if you ask any law-abiding gun owner for the honest truth, he’ll say the same thing. We don’t talk about it much, if at all, but it’s always there. Always. Trust me. In a free country like the U.S., your anti-gun stance is entirely voluntary. You don’t have to be a coward. But you choose to. The only way you could invite more contempt is to adopt the mantle of male feminist. Or use the term “toxic masculinity” without irony.

There are some caveats.

It Happened to You: We understand that if you or someone very close to you has been an innocent victim of gun violence, you might become a gun-grabber as a result. (A gun-grabber is someone who would deny other people their Second Amendment rights.) It’s unfortunate, but we get it. We wish you’d think differently, but we sympathize and hope you’ll eventually come to the wisdom that whatever happened to you was a result of an evil action by an evil person with evil intent. It has nothing to do with the vast, vast majority of legal gun owners who don’t commit murder with firearms.

You’re a Kid: Young people often think emotionally, not logically. We expect children to act on their emotions, so they typically get a pass on serious issues. It’s why we don’t elect children to higher office or consult them on important policy decisions (unless it’s good PR to take the meeting). They lack wisdom and experience. When children are trotted out in front of microphones to bleat about the evils of firearms, we don’t take them seriously. We do feel bad for them, however, because they’re usually saddled with ineffectual, unwise parents who haven’t brought them up properly. And we contemn the adults who thrust them into the limelight as manipulative, amoral creeps.

You’ve Got a Uterus: Despite the many, many efforts by our betters in the media, academia, and politics to ignore the basic differences between the sexes, we don’t expect women to take on traditionally masculine roles unless circumstances demand it. However, it’s clear that many gun-grabbers are women. What female gun-grabbers don’t understand is that the gun-grabbing stance feeds into every negative stereotype of women ever conceived of: weak, defenseless, easily frightened, manipulative (“let’s you and him fight”), vituperative/shrewish (“you need a gun because you’ve got a small dick”). These are not traits of strong, independent women, and yet they characterize female gun-grabbers to a T.

You Ain’t from Around Here: You may live in a country that has disarmed its populace. It sucks. We get it. We understand that you can’t always just pack up and move to a place that respects rights granted to you by your Creator. So we give you a pass…until you start talking about taking away other people’s firearms. People from gun-free Utopias who feel like they have to insert themselves into the gun debates of other countries are subject to the same deserved contempt as the native cowards who would disarm everyone else.

You Just Don’t Have One: It’s perfectly fine if you decide that owning a firearm and addressing the issues associated with it aren’t relevant to your daily life. It’s a luxury, one you should appreciate. All we ask is that you keep your ambivalence to your own personal sphere, and don’t try to curtail everyone else’s liberties.

What frustrates us about the debate on gun ownership is that the arguments against it are so weak, so foolish, so emotionally-derived that no thinking adult can take them seriously, and yet they come up again and again. These arguments are almost invariably promulgated by people who don’t own guns, have never shot a gun, aren’t familiar with gun culture, and know less about guns than I know about 14th century Swedish poetry. And yet whenever some sickening clot of human debris commits a mass murder with a gun, the same arguments are shoved into the limelight as if they’ve never been addressed before.

If You Loved Your Kids as Much as You Love Your Guns, You’d Repeal the 2nd Amendment: Gun owners are as horrified and dismayed at what happens during a mass shooting as any normal human being. We grieve terribly for the murdered children in Parkland, Florida; Newtown, Connecticut; Virginia Tech; etc. It’s a nightmare too horrible to contemplate: to kiss your child goodbye, send him off to school, and learn that he’s never coming home again because a monster shot him to death. I’d die in place of my little boy in a heartbeat. So it’s a malicious, inhuman assumption among gun-grabbers that gun owners love our guns more than we love our children. Note also that gun-grabbers are typically pro-choicers (abortion enthusiasts). More unborn babies are murdered in the womb each year than are killed with firearms by a factor of over 400, and yet we’re the ones who don’t love our children? We love our children so much that we’re willing to risk our own lives to protect them. Gun-grabbers have abandoned that sacred duty, not us. If gun-grabbers loved their kids more than they love living in fear, they’d stop infringing on everyone’s right to self-defense.

What About Common Sense Gun Control Laws: When you’re a coward who demands that other men risk their lives to protect your family, your definition of common sense is far, far different from mine. Not only that, but gun-grabbers never stop; the ambition of every gun-grabber ever minted is to outlaw all private firearms ownership. They won’t admit it in public, but it’s true, and we all know it, and that’s why we will never ever give an inch on this issue. No more new laws. No more curtailing God-granted liberties. Gun-grabbers will never be satisfied until everyone’s as disarmed and helpless as they are. They won’t stop, so we won’t budge. We’re not as stupid as they imagine us to be.

Who Needs a Military-Style Assault Rifle, Anyway: Just using the term “military-style assault rifle” shows you to be unserious and ill-informed, but we’ll set that aside to address the wider issue. You don’t get to determine the nature and style of the tool I use to defend my family. Do I get to choose which car you drive? Which house you own? No? Why not? Cars aren’t mentioned in the Constitution, but guns are. You don’t have a right to own a house or a car. The Second Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights, not the Bill of Needs. So if I decide that I need an AR-15 to protect myself, that’s my decision, not yours. No, the Framers of the Constitution didn’t conceive of 30-round magazines, but they also didn’t imagine the internet, either. And yet you’re on it, spewing out ill-informed buffoonery in the wake of a terrible event. The First Amendment actually covers that, so go for it. But if I decide that I need an AR-15, and it’s legal for me to own one, get out of my way, coward.

The Only People Who Should Own Guns Are the Police and Military: For childish, emotionally-derived thinking, this one tops everything. Even if you do repeal the Second Amendment and outlaw private firearms ownership (which will never, ever happen), how are you going to enforce the ban? One of the things that makes America great is that we won’t allow our God-given rights to be stripped away, and we definitely won’t offer up our firearms to be confiscated. So what are you going to do, go to every house in America with armed men and search for guns? Doesn’t that go against the Fourth Amendment? Are you going to repeal that amendment, too? How will you enforce this country-wide gun seizure to achieve the violence-free Utopia of your dreams? Doesn’t this kind of thinking make you a dirty, nasty, authoritarian little fascist? Even if your gun confiscation fantasy somehow comes to pass, you’ve only disarmed the law-abiding part of the population. The criminals, who by definition don’t follow laws, will still be armed, leaving everyone else at their dubious mercy. Not only that, but if we’ve learned anything from the last couple of years, it’s that the police are corrupt racists who love to shoot people of color. Black Lives Matter and its accomplices in the news media, entertainment sphere, and political office taught me that. And you want the police to own all the guns? Do you see the contradiction here?

Unilateral Disarmament Works in (Insert Utopian Country Here): The U.S. is not Australia. Or the UK. Or France. Or Norway. We have different people, a different culture, different mores, and a different form of government. Our Constitution enshrines inalienable rights that no other country allows. So what works in your overseas Utopia won’t work here. If the people of Australia are so much more enlightened and violence-free, what’re you doing with us gun nuts, anyway? Don’t you care about your children? If you loved your children you’d get them away from the gun-crazy lunatics in this country, wouldn’t you?

If any of this upsets you, good: growth only comes from discomfort. Gun-grabbers always want to have a conversation about guns, but they never want to talk about the things that actually contribute to gun violence, like the dangerous effects of psychoactive medication on young people. Or the increase of graphic violence in popular media. Or the embrace of disgusting, violence-soaked rap culture. Or the deliberate destruction of the traditional family. Not only that, but if you dare to mention these issues in public, you run the risk of social and professional ostracism: it’s racist to criticize rap culture. It’s bigoted/homophobic/sexist to support traditional families. It’s anti-science to question the wisdom of drugging difficult children. So the gun-grabbers get to control the conversation: defend your gun fetish on our terms, you child-hating, death-loving reprobate, and don’t bring up anything else because it’s racist. Sexist. A distraction. Whataboutism.

There really is no point to debating gun ownership. Gun-grabbers dishonestly misrepresent the argument at every turn, wave children’s bloody shirts before the red has dried, and are motivated by Utopian fantasies better suited to John Lennon-esque song lyrics than serious policy. Cowardice is a choice, not a necessity.

It’s too late for me, but you can still save yourself. Check out my latest piece at The Loftus Party:

Watching Miss Sloane is an exercise in endurance unlike any movie you will ever experience. It’s longer than Robert Altman’s 3-hour epic Short Cuts, the Director’s Cut of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Andy Warhol’s 320-minute experimental film Sleep put together. I started watching it on Monday morning and the credits didn’t roll until Friday around 3 AM.